Page 4 of Heart Throb

CAMILLA

Ihave three planners and I lay them out on the bed before me so I can see what my week looks like.

One outlines my work schedule. It is color-coded in red, green, and blue. Red is for the book store where I work on the weekends from open to close. The owners like to have their free time to go fishing and hunting, so I cover the 8:00 am to 6:00 pm shift on Saturday and Sunday. Green is for the Sunshine Diner. Just a few weeks ago, I was pulling split shifts before and after work. But now that I’ve graduated from high school, I’m working from 5:00 am until noon on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That’s all that Sarah could give me with the influx of able bodies looking for jobs. Blue is for the Castle Creek Golf Course. It’s about three miles out of town and I have to bike there four days a week, but they’re one of the few restaurants on Bourbon Peak that hire sixteen-year-olds. Tuesday thru Friday, I work there from 3:00 to 9:00 pm.

It isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things when you add up the hours. It’s only 20 hours on the weekend, 21 hours at Sunshine, and 24 hours at the Golf Course. That’s practically nothing.

The second planner lays out all of my free time and what I could be doing to make a quick buck instead. I could be babysitting for the Cavell family. They have four children and they’re always looking for an escape. But the last time I was there the three boys tied me to a chair while the girl shot plastic balls at my head. So I generally save the Cavell family as a once-a-month, last resort kind of thing.

I’m not proud to save I’ve dumpster-dived before, but people throw out some perfectly good stuff. If you’re willing to clean it off and shine it up, you can turn a profit on furniture, clothes, and even some used kitchen appliances. The human race will truly perish due to its own inability to learn how to recycle and reuse.

The third planner keeps track of innocuous dates and appointments. My father’s sentencing hearing in three weeks. Scholarship applications. SAT prep dates. SAT test dates for fall. Birthdays. Important dates to my friends. It’s all listed here so that I don’t forget.

Looking at all these dates on the calendar, you would think that I had my life together. You would think that at any moment, I’d get off my ass, walk out the front door, and watch it all fall into place. But that isn’t how life works.

Every day there is someone screaming at people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But those are the people who don’t know what it’s like to come from abject poverty. Or if they have, they’ve forgotten what the climb was like.

I remember the year when we couldn’t afford real food. That’s when my dad made the switch to meth. He was making a decent living selling weed, but it was the kind of decent living that paid for our space rent and kept our lights on. It didn’t put food on our table or anything like that. People were forever telling him to get a real job, but he always came back, “What can corporate America give me that I can’t get under the table? A tax bill? Nah, fuck that.” Then he’d go back to selling his joints and complaining about being hungry.

I ate a lot of ramen that year. Then one day I came home and there was Kraft in the cupboard. It wasn’t even the off-brand mac and cheese that we sometimes got, it was the good stuff. The kind that cost a dollar. At that time in our life, that was expensive. I remember looking at that blue box and wondering if we’d been reverse robbed. I wondered if my dad had been humbled enough to go to one of the churches and get a donation box. He wasn’t. He had just changed his business model.

In the refrigerator, we had real milk, not the powdered stuff. There was even butter. I made the box of Kraft that day and ate the whole thing. Every single noodle until my belly was so full that I thought I was going to vomit.

When my dad got home, I thought he was going to be upset. He looked at the empty box on the counter and then at me lying on the couch clutching my stomach and I thought he was going to yell. But instead, he laughed. “Our troubles are over, baby. The good times have come to the Graves family.”

But now I stare at the neat block lettering that says Anthony Graves - Sentencing 1:30 pm, dated three weeks from now and I know that the good times were never here. In the America where we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, the Graves family was simply unable to make it happen.

I’ve known since I was twelve years old that I wasn’t living the typical American lifestyle. It wasn’t the lack of a mother figure or a drug dealer for a dad. It wasn’t growing up in a trailer when all my friends had real homes. It wasn’t getting all my clothes from the donation box at church. It was all the looks I got from people when I went places. It was seeing the pity in their eyes when I walked into school. It was the look of horror on the cashier’s face when I presented her with my father’s WIC card because he was too strung out to buy groceries.

I tried to grow up thinking that I could change my stars. If I was smart enough, if I studied enough, I could get scholarships and go to college and get away from all of this. But nobody tells you that there are fees associated with taking the SAT. And that even if you get those waived for being a lower-income student, some colleges charge an application fee. It all starts adding up. Scholarships only get you so far. Next thing you know, you find yourself standing on a cliff wondering if the next logical step is to jump.

I could have gone in to my father’s career of choice; nobody would have blamed me. There’s money to be made in the meth industry. There were plenty of nights that I lay in bed and questioned why I didn’t follow in his footsteps. I could have ensured my first semester at the college of my choice easily. But I’d made a career out of making my own choices, not following his. I couldn’t turn back now.

So I lie down on my bed and feel the planners against my back. The ridges of the spiral binding cut into my skin, but that’s okay. At least I won’t get comfortable. I have to leave for the golf course in an hour anyway.

Originally, I wanted to leave for college directly after I graduated high school, but drawbacks in my father’s business have left me unable to do so. When business was slow, I had to cut into my stash of funds to keep the heat on during the winter months. When the cops were putting heat on him and he had to shut things down for a while, I used my hard-earned cash to buy groceries. The money that I was going to put toward moving away and going to college has been severely depleted. I will likely spend another year working my ass off before I can get off this God-forsaken mountain and make a life for myself.

I don’t hate Bourbon Peak. In fact, it’s beautiful. The people I’ve met here are wonderful and almost everybody is nice. But my memories are tainted with drugs and poverty and that is something I want to escape from.

I hear the front door open and a crash immediately follows. I shoot up out of bed as goosebumps flare-up on my skin.

“Sorry!” Griffin calls from the living room. “It’s me.”

My heart is racing in my chest. For a second, I thought that Tucker had returned. It would have been stupid of him to do so, but he’s never been the smartest. I throw myself back down on the bed and groan. Having Griffin here is going to be a nightmare. Worse than having someone in the house who doesn’t care about me is having someone in the house who does. But I guess it’ll be nice to have some eye candy around.

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